Teacher to his jailmates, ‘father’ to his jailers

Reuters – Apartheid-era South Africa’s most feared prison, Robben Island, remains inextricably linked with Nelson Mandela, its most famous inmate who spent decades of hard labour educating his comrades and charming even his granite-hearted jailers.

Now a museum and popular tourist attraction, the windswept lump of rock in shark-infested waters off Cape Town kept black agitators in isolation for three decades until president F.W. de Klerk began dismantling white-minority rule in 1990.

Mandela, who died on Thursday at 95, was first sent to Robben Island for a brief period in 1962 for minor political offences, then returned two years later for a life sentence after being convicted of sabotage and conspiracy to overthrow the state.

Aged 46 when he began his term, Mandela was sentenced with other leading members of the African National Congress to years of hard labour, breaking rocks in a limestone quarry.

Chained in rows of four, prisoners worked eight to 10 hours a day, five days a week. The harsh glare of the sun on the white rocks, combined with the dust, caused permanent damage to Mandela’s eyes.

Despite the hardship, Mandela did not direct his frustrations at his immediate captors.

“He was always friendly, polite and helpful,” Christo Brand, a prison warder who was with Mandela from 1978 until his release in 1990, told Reuters during a recent visit to the island.

“He became like a father to me. If I needed some help and assistance with something, he was always there for me,” said Brand, who now helps at the Robben Island museum.

In his autobiography, “Long Walk to Freedom”, much of which was written covertly in his cell on the island, Mandela recalls the loneliness and isolation felt by inmates.

“Robben Island was without question the harshest, most iron-fisted outpost in the South African penal system,” he wrote.